On December 21-22, 2022, a number of US states were hit by bad weather, which the media immediately dubbed “snow Apocalypse”.
More than 60 million Americans are expected to be affected by the invasion of a violent wave of bad weather with temperatures falling as low as -70°F (-56.67°C).
As you can see from the infographic, icy air crossed the continent and rushed to the state of New Mexico, the city of Albuquerque and the residence of Saul Goodman.
This is a “once-in-a-generation storm,” the local NWS agency in Buffalo, New York, warned on Twitter.
“This cold can cause frostbite to exposed skin within minutes, as well as hypothermia and death if exposure is prolonged,” the NWS warned.
Private weather website AccuWeather warned of the possibility of a “bomb cyclone”, which is formed when polar air meets a warmer air mass, causing a very rapid drop in atmospheric pressure.
Cold warnings and alerts have been issued for parts of at least 26 states, according to the NWS, and stretch from the Canadian border to the Gulf Coast in Texas.
Moreover, the cold snap came somehow suddenly: it had just been warm and suddenly, in half an hour, strong sub-zero temperatures appeared. Even for the not so comfortable Midwest of the USA, minus -70°F is way too much. Wyoming now looks as something like this:
Although cold weather at this time of the year is a relatively normal phenomenon, a curious statement appeared on the NASA website:
An experiment to bounce a radio signal off an asteroid on Dec. 27 will serve as a test for probing a larger asteroid that in 2029 will pass closer to Earth than the many geostationary satellites that orbit our planet.
The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program research site in Gakona will transmit radio signals to asteroid 2010 XC15, which could be about 500 feet across. The University of New Mexico Long Wavelength Array near Socorro, New Mexico, and the Owens Valley Radio Observatory Long Wavelength Array near Bishop, California, will receive the signal.
Many programs exist to quickly detect asteroids, determine their orbit and shape and image their surface, either with optical telescopes or the planetary radar of the Deep Space Network, NASA’s network of large and highly senstive radio antennas in California, Spain and Australia.
Those radar-imaging programs use signals of short wavelengths, which bounce off the surface and provide high-quality external images but don’t penetrate an object.
HAARP will transmit a continually chirping signal to asteroid 2010 XC15 at slightly above and below 9.6 megahertz (9.6 million times per second). The chirp will repeat at two-second intervals. Distance will be a challenge, Haynes said, because the asteroid will be twice as far from Earth as the moon is.
The University of Alaska Fairbanks operates HAARP under an agreement with the Air Force, which developed and owned HAARP but transferred the research instruments to UAF in August 2015.
Large installations such as HAARP are way different from conventional transmitters and receivers, which, with a single push of a button, turn on to the fullest. Large antennas require a certain warm-up, which takes several days – the power supplied to them is increased. And it just so happened that as soon as HAARP began to warm up in Alaska with the aim of sending a reflected signal somewhere in New Mexico, a wave of extreme cold immediately stretched along this line.
As you can see, HAARP works quite well, although NASA denies it. Most likely on December 27, when the antennas are turned on at full throttle, the southern states of the United States will have to face certain difficulties and witness what they have never seen before.
